The context of a community can be a school, a
locality such as an apartment complex, a village or a
people interested in disaster management. What the
community is, is then defined by its size, nature of
urgency, process of management and the applications
that they develop and use.

We are basically concerning ourselves about mobility
and extranets in general, and certain social and
collaborative applications in particular. These could
be personal web sites or popular collaborative sites,
but are likely to include custom community specific
localized set of applications that serve the functioning
needs of a community and related tasks of an individual.

On the technology infrastructure side, WiFi or mobile
networks will play a significant role in defining the
nature of interactions on the Internet and extranet.
The community specific application platforms will
be custom indigenous portals that feed into larger
data/knowledge harvesters and in turn get fed from
such pools organized according to their specific
taxonomies and concepts of interest.

Let us consider the case of a school in Southern India
with about 1200 kids and 150 teaching and other staff.
The staff were introduced to Pantoto - a platform
using which communities collaboratively create simple
data gathering and process management applications.
The staff and teachers enthusiastically developed
five different applications in about 3 days. They
are excited about streamlining processes and
contributing to the applications that help manage
the everyday issues of personnel, teacher substitutions,
parent queries, student absence, admissions, library
lending details, bus route management and such.

The school has 25 buses coming from various parts
of the neighborhood, from as far away as 35
kilometers. Often both teachers and students travel
in these buses. The travel time on the average is about 30
minutes each way. At school, they have access to
Internet but the main artery for data exchange is
for a local area network that is enhanced by WiFi.
Various teachers and students have cell phones resulting
in alternative direct access to each other and the
outside world. Using the cell phones is expensive
but not controlled while the LAN and WiFi is free but
controlled. It is expected that most students and teachers
will have cell phones or other mobile devices in a year or
two, while class rooms and labs have computers and
some of the students and teachers have laptops. The
school has three campuses, each with its own LAN/WiFi but
all three are not currently connected but they intend
to be wireless connected in the near future.

A small application such as admissions process management
might need the attention of as many as three teachers per
admission application. Teachers and staff during the
upcoming admissions season get involved with this,
while teacher substitutions, students assignments, front
office needs and such remain. Last week, the teachers built
an admissions process management applications, using Pantoto.
Pantoto can be considered as a data blogger and collator.
They were excited to be able to quickly define their needs
and build an application in half a day. Other teachers
built similar web-applications for their needs.
The sense among these teachers was that they could
soon be able to manage and help manage the meta processes
of running the school. Some of the teachers do not
like to sitting by a desk, others are by their role
always moving from class to class and between
campuses. They seem to appreciate the nature of
working with locally hosted web-applications, as
they only need a browser to connect, work and know of
the updated overview of the tasks they are in charge
of. The questions and needs now are how they can use
their cells phones. We discuss among ourselves the
possibility of providing an SMS gateway to the
applications using which they can reach and interact
using forms. They would like get notices of the new
entries and update the status or inform others of the
status so as to minimize any adverse impact on the
students. SMS gateways result in many SMSes being sent
to authenticate and use a form driven entry, view recent
entries and take action. They would eventually want VoIP
using WiFi on their mobile devices so they can verbally
communicate with others in the campus. They even discuss
that students are planning a radio broadcast between
4 and 5 PM everyday, using the WiFi network.

For our discussion these are similar to the needs of a
village community that manages a local job portal, serve
market prices and provide disease assistance; or
a disaster situation where missing people databases
and volunteer/aid management become an issue.

Above is a case that we think will drive a lot of the
interactions, from e-governance to community needs,
in the mobile world of developing countries. Whether
it is because the time spent on a bus is the best time
to update the task of the day to either prepare for
the upcoming day or to mark the end of the day, or simply
because of the ubiquitous availability of the mobile device.
In the coming years, these updates can instead be voice
interactions with applications, where the
applications are custom built for the community, serving
localized needs across the digital and literacy divides.